ARCHITECTURE VIEW

Considering the Once and Future Whitney Museum

By Herbert Muschamp

Published: November 17, 1996

SOMETIMES JUST SHUTTING up can be a powerfully creative act. This is one message that comes through from the small but valuable show now on view in the lobby gallery of the Whitney Museum of American art. Organized by Nicholas Olsberg of the Canadian Center for Architecture, the exhibition, ''Breuer's Whitney,'' focuses on the museum's own building, the inverted ziggurat of dark granite, designed by Marcel Breuer, that opened 30 years ago.

In addition to drawings and models of Breuer's design, the show includes photographs documenting quarters previously occupied by the Whitney, first on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and later on West 54th Street in a building now occupied by the Museum of Modern Art. Looking beyond the Breuer design, the exhibition also includes drawings for two plans for the Whitney's expansion: the designs by Michael Graves (1985-88), which the museum eventually abandoned, and the far more modest current project designed by Richard Gluckman.

In celebrating Breuer's building, the show inadvertently recalls the era that produced the Whitney and distinguished contemporaries like Lever House, Seagram, the Pepsi-Cola Building, the Guggenheim, the Ford Foundation, Kips Bay Towers, CBS and the Museum of Modern Art Guesthouse.

From the 1950's through the 60's, no city in the world produced a finer array. They were among the reasons sophisticated people wanted to live in New York. Though these buildings had their passionate detractors, the debate that swirled around them was itself a sign of New York City's cultural vitality.

If one compares them with buildings of recent years, one quality immediately stands out. The earlier examples are buildings, not building skins. There is an organic relationship between interior and exterior, between space and structure, function and form.

The Whitney's Madison Avenue entrance bridge, for instance, does not just convey you into a building; it draws you into a space: the sculpture garden below, the overhangs above, sharply delineate a void that continues when you enter the building. The bridge also introduces you to a material, a structural technique and the angular vocabulary of forms from which the entire building is made.

The split-slate floors of the lobby are discernibly from the same palette as the dark gray granite of the facade; the concrete coffered ceilings of the galleries above echo the reinforced concrete framing walls outside. Integrity, in other words, is the design's overall effect. The parts have an integral relationship to the whole.

In the modernist view espoused by Breuer, integrity of structure and form held moral significance. And integrity also assumes a specific metaphoric meaning in the context of a museum. Not only is it a quality people look for in a work of art, but art itself performs the function of articulating a culture's connective tissue.

Famously, of course, Breuer's concern for integrity did not extend to the buildings adjoining his own.

Like most of the modern landmarks of that era, the Whitney is flagrantly anti-contextual. Indeed, the word ''contextualism'' was first promoted by Robert Venturi as a reaction to the detachment of modern buildings from their surroundings. And it is under the sign of contextualism that architects have produced the ''building skin'' architecture of the last two decades. Many would say that the scarcity of recent first-rate buildings in New York is a small price to pay for a less fragmented cityscape. They would make the valid point that the city is the greater whole.

For some visitors, the most arresting part of the show will be Michael Graves's drawings for the museum's expansion plan, initially prepared in 1985 and revised by him over the next three years. While Breuer's building has long been part of the cityscape, the controversy sparked by Graves's design remains vivid.

His design for the expansion, with its reduction of the Breuer building to one element in a hyperactive classical collage surmounted by a monumental temple, is still startling, perhaps even more so now than when it was unveiled. This may be because, since then, Graves's built work has given us the chance to see how much is lost in the translation from his gorgeous architectural illustrations to his completed structures.

I was not among those who were outraged by Graves's design. Seduction is so rare in architecture, I consented to be seduced by Graves's drawings. The renderings for his unbuilt Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge (1977) were stunning. They introduced what seemed to me the most compelling formal vocabulary -- after Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's -- to emerge from the post-modern movement. Later, after a visit to Graves's renovation of the Newark Museum, my view changed.

The Newark project was completed at a time of renewed appreciation for 19th-century American painting, one of the featured holdings of the museum. Thanks to shows like the Museum of Modern Art's ''Natural Paradise'' in 1976 and the National Gallery's show on the Luminists in 1980, it was no longer possible to dismiss this work as a symbol of America's cultural inferiority to Europe.

Whether or not Graves was aware of this revision, his design for Newark undermined it. The museum's dusty colors, claustrophobic galleries and retro light fixtures put 19th-century painting back in the granny's attic from which it had so recently been retrieved. Forms that in Graves's drawings appeared free, playful and quirky made for clunky, quaint and overbearing buildings. The paintings could not speak for themselves amid this neo-Victorian chatter.

GRAVES'S WHITNEY DESIGN enlarged The visual yakety-yak to blockbuster dimensions. In his catalogue, Mr. Olsberg writes that Graves's drawing ''failed to suggest how carefully Graves worked to maintain the sculptural and functional independence and integrity of the Breuer building, or how, on a New York street, the massive superstructure would recede from view.''

Perhaps not. But the drawing does reveal with perfect clarity Graves's essential antipathy to Breuer's conception. Moreover, it is unclear how Graves's design for the Whitney demonstrated greater sympathy for the adjacent town houses by proposing to tear them down.

If the plan had a single virtue, it was to clarify one of the Breuer building's greatest strengths. It is a building about listening -- an odd metaphor for a visual art museum, but no other will quite serve. With its dark facade, its receding entrance, the building conveys the power of tuning in. The building is not neutral, nor does it propose that listening is a passive act; on the contrary, the building suggests that it can be an aggressive one. The result is not just a space in which it is possible to pay attention to paintings. It is also a space that suggests a way of thinking about art: the idea that an artist is as much a listener as a speaker, attentive to a silence more powerful than voice.

Photos: Michael Graves's design reduced Breuer's building to one element in a hyperactive classical collage. (William Taylor/Whitney Museum of American Art); With the overhangs above, the Sculpture Court at the Whitney defines a space through which visitors enter; at right is a 1966 view of the museum from 75th Street. (Ezra Stoller/Esto, 1966)